Firefall Could Have Been Great, But Poor Design Holds It Back

Boom, headshot. WIRED

The worst part about Firefall is that you can feel the potential bubbling beneath the surface. This is a game that could have been something special, but a plethora of minor issues hold it back—not just from being great, but so much so that it’s actually not very fun.

Created by Red 5 Studios, Firefall’s launch at the end of July was nearly four years in the making, having been officially announced at the Penny Arcade Expo in 2010. The free-to-play game combines the combat of a class-based first-person shooter with the world, level, and mechanics design of a massive multiplayer online roleplaying game. In other words, think Borderlands plus World of Warcraft plus jetpacks.

In this way, Firefall is nothing like Halo, Call of Duty or Battlefield, the standard multiplayer deathmatch shooters. Instead, Firefall players progress through the game by completing quests, slaying monsters and gaining experience, as in MMOs like World of Warcraft, Rift and Guild Wars 2.

But this MMO-based design model is where Firefall falls flat. At its onset, a quick tutorial introduces you to the various starter classes and how to play, then spits you out into a newbie zone. Go here, do this, kill these guys, fetch that, rinse and repeat. It’s not much fun.

For one, you can only have a single quest active at a time. Most quests are multi-stage affairs—you pick it up at the job board in town, run to the first waypoint, complete some objective like clicking things on the ground or killing enemies, run to the next waypoint, repeat, go back to town. In most MMOs, players are able to pick up a handful of quests from various NPCs in a single location, run out and complete all the objectives, then return to town and turn in multiple quests at once. But with Firefall‘s one-quest-at-a-time system, you can’t optimize your time.

Another gripe is that the quests are, more or less, randomly generated. Each quest has set objectives, but these objectives spawn at random places upon the map, which opens a whole world of problems. Objectives that require enemies to be killed will only spawn those enemies once you’ve arrived at the arbitrarily-located waypoint. Only then will the game credit kills of these spawned enemies towards your quest counter, even if an identical enemy had naturally spawned at that point on the map.

But most importantly, it makes the quests feel boring. Quick voiceovers provide the context for whatever mundane task I’ve been sent to complete, which in theory is a better option than a block of text I’m not going to read. But the tasks themselves are wholly uninteresting: I can’t count the number of corpses I’ve inspected, packages I’ve picked up, and bandits I’ve slain. Most MMOs have come a long way from slaying boars in the forest. Firefall must have missed that memo.

Most of my time playing Firefall was spent traveling from one waypoint beacon to the next. The only thing that made this sort of fun was my “personal glider pad,” an item that lets you launch into the air and glide to your destination. Of course, I only had this because I had a VIP subscription to the game (which also gets you extra experience points and cash).

The glider helps get from one boring mission waypoint to the next. WIRED

In other words, players who don’t shell out cash will be hoofing it even more than I did. And while you can convert the gold you loot from enemies into “Red Beans” (the currency used to pay for VIP status) it would have taken quite a bit of saving. If I converted every single credit earned in my 20 hours of play, I’d have around seven Red Beans. A week of VIP status costs 40.

I could go on and on with Firefall‘s issues, but it would seem like beating a dead horse at this point. Which is really unfortunate because the game so clearly has potential. The combat plays a lot like the super-fun Borderlands, but it lacks Gearbox’s panache. Perhaps if other players are as disappointed as I am, Red 5 Studios can give Firefall a big overhaul, Final Fantasy XIV-style, and fix its problem.

Then again, it is truly free to play. No initial purchase, no subscription fee.

But all that means is that the question is not “Is Firefall worth your money?” but “Is Firefall worth your time?” Right now, the answer is no.